Improving the level of healthcare requires accurate diagnosis and more frequent monitoring of health conditions. The rising cost of healthcare makes it difficult for patients to achieve such higher levels of healthcare. As patients become more educated about their health, more of the high tech miniaturized electronic technologies become affordably available.
Achieving higher efficiency, greater frequency of monitoring, higher performance, real-time communication, minimized maintenance, and lower costs as well as the reduced burden of carrying various portable devices will greatly enhance healthcare quality. Patients with multiple diseases to be monitored require multiple instruments to be carried, in addition to other consumer devices like cellular phones. A lot of functionality is redundant in the various instruments and devices. One aspect of the present invention aims to efficiently consolidate and utilize the commonalities of function and redistribute it to achieve optimum cost, ease of use, and greater functionality most comprehensively. By way of example, this aspect of the present invention provides an Internet-based disease monitoring system (“IDMS”) that can be utilized for most critical and commonly monitored ailments and conditions. The redistribution is aimed at allocating technical complexities and costs such that all component, process, and system nodes are well integrated for optimum results with the patient end being the most compact and least costly for maximum ease and utility.
Recently there have been advancements in the field of telemedicine such as eHealth, electronic medical record/electronic health record (“EMR/EHR”), Healthcare informatics and personal connected healthcare, enabling the use of mobile communication devices (such as smartphones) to connect existing medical devices (such as glucometers and pulse oxymeters) to Internet-based servers for uploading data to patient records. However, since all the computations are currently conducted on full-function devices, any upgrades to the system require changing the device or physically upgrading it. There is limited ability to integrate the various nodes in the healthcare spectrum. The user is still required to carry each device along with the smartphone, with the inherent redundancy of the device housing, microprocessor, software, display, keypad, electronics, etc.